Among the Founding Fathers and as a force in the American Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) stands in the first circle. He was a scientist of immense range and brilliance: his studies of electricity advanced physics; he helped shape the field of demography, charted the Gulf Stream, was an early supporter of the wave theory of light, etc. He was a consequential inventor, his inventions including the lightning rod, bifocals, glass harmonica, the medical catheter, and the odometer. He was an inimitable founder of organizations and systems that vitalized the body politic: Philadelphia’s first public library and its first fire department, the University of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society for scientists; he obtained a charter for America’s first hospital; he was essential in the development of a national communications network in the form of the postal system.

Born in Boston, he ran away to Philadelphia at 17 and became a newspaperman, printer, and publisher. He was a self-made man, exemplifying American social mobility through frugality and industriousness (and “networking”). As the first U.S. ambassador to France, Franklin proved indispensable in negotiating an alliance with that nation in 1777, without which American independence could not have been secured. From 1785 to 1788, he served as governor of Pennsylvania. During his life, Franklin moved from being a small slaveholder to abolitionism, evincing the effects of increasing enlightenment. The Autobiography provides some specificity to the republican call for virtue in the citizenry.